Middle School > Language Arts > English Videos
English is the world’s so-called “lingua franca.” It’s the language of international exchange, which is why so many students have to study it. Mastery of English is an asset that will benefit a lot of them in their future careers. For this reason, it is always a separate subject up until the end of secondary education.
Middle school English covers a wide variety of topics, including speech, writing and reading comprehension. These lessons are usually more advanced, training students to be more fluent and to go beyond basic English when communicating their ideas.
Reading materials in middle school English classes tend to be more complex reading as well. They include short stories, poems, and anthologies for fiction, as well as newspapers, magazines and research articles for non-fiction. Students are taught to comprehend texts on a deeper level, analyze their meaning and understand the opinions and attitudes of the authors. These lessons train students to, essentially, read between the lines.
Middle school is also where students get introduced to advanced sentence structures like compound and complex sentences. Independent clauses, intervening clauses and the like would be a few of the things students would use from this time on. There’s also the passive and active voice and their different uses. At the end of middle school, students should be able to convert between active and passive forms without much difficulty.
Speaking is also an essential skill that middle schoolers must have a grasp of. For that reason, their English classes also incorporate topics like debating and different speech techniques that they can apply themselves. Classroom speech activities further enhance this skill and extracurricular speech clubs are often available for students who take a great interest in the subject. When students are trained early on how to become excellent speakers, they can achieve so much later on in life.
